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A Baseball Golden Age?

April 10, 2013 3:50 pmApril 10, 2013 3:50 pm

That’s the bold claim advanced last week by Michael Brendan Dougherty, who just took a step away from political writing to found a baseball newsletter (news-email?) called “The Slurve”, and who gives a great interview about the decision here. His case that baseball is peaking acknowledges the sport’s various difficulties (the Hall of Fame’s steroid problems, the pace of games, the Florida Marlins), but then follows with this:

But overall the sport has never been better. The league has achieved a wonderful balance of parity and dynastic success, feeding just enough hope to smaller-market teams and just enough resentment of larger, perennially competitive ones. Most of the league’s ballparks have been updated in the last 20 years, and on the whole they are better than the stadiums that preceded them, less claustrophobic, better staffed, safer, and, yes, more expensive.

And for all the faults of the league office, the sport has effected a revolution in how we find the sport. Online watching allows fans to see every out-of-market game on their computers or on television. The league has opened up the data about itself available to the nerds. You now can quantify the movement of every pitch thrown.

Advanced statistical analysis has given us greater depth of insight into the players and the franchises themselves. But at the same time we don’t have to be intimidated by the spreadsheets.

Some self-designated “old school” writers like Murray Chass complain that the new stat freaks think the game is simply a clash of abstracted probabilities. But the geek view of the game has not penetrated the experience of the ballpark or even the way the game is portrayed on television. During a televised game, we’re not told a player’s VORP—his Value Over Replacement Player—which would add nothing to the narrative drama of a televised game. But we’re still informed of his batting average, giving us a sense of what is about to happen. The fan’s experience of baseball has not become an embodied math problem. It is still a game of leather, ash bats, cleats. It remains an athletic endeavor. We just understand it better.

This is well-argued. The occasional faults of the Ye Olde Hardball Theme Park approach to stadium-building notwithstanding, the transformation of the ballpark experience over the last two decades really has been a huge blessing for baseball fans — and one that’s arguably underrated by a elite media culture whose members were more likely to have grown up with Fenway and Wrigley and Dodger Stadium and the old Yankee Stadium than the utilitarian drear of, say, Three Rivers or Riverfront or the Metrodome. The point about the stathead revolution being something than fans can ultimately embrace or ignore, as they prefer, is likewise well-taken. The benefits of revenue sharing, increasing parity, and the decline of free agency to the average fan’s (if not the average Yankee fan’s) experience are obvious and palpable. And Dougherty doesn’t even bring up baseball’s two decades of labor peace, which would have seemed unimaginable after the 1981 and 1994 debacles, and which lie at the heart of Bud Selig’s not-entirely-implausible case for being the most underrated commissioner in sports. (Yes, it’s a low bar.)

So why am I not completely sold? Well, three reasons. First, because even though I’m in the “forgive and enshrine” camp when it comes to steroids and the Hall of Fame, the era of Bonds and McGwire clearly has changed fans’ relationship to baseball history, heroism and records in ways that will take decades to work through. Not that this relationship was ever free of mythmaking and convenient elisions, of course. But it’s still a new thing, and not a good one, to have baseball’s most famous records held by an era’s highest-profile cheaters, and to know that the cheating continues today, however much it’s been reduced. (Not that this problem is unique to baseball, of course.) There was an uncomplicated pleasure, twenty years ago, in watching a home run hitter on a fast start and wondering if he might challenge Ruth and Maris. Today’s fans can feel some of the same thrill, but not without doubts and cynicism creeping in, and nothing can really undo that change. Never such innocence again …

Second, like Dougherty I don’t worry about the stathead revolution drowning the average fan in an avalanche of VORP and WARP, but I do worry a bit that a more efficient, ruthlessly data-driven approach to baseball makes the game less fun to watch. Like Steve Sailer, I think Bill James is a hero but also wonder about diminishing marginal returns: Do we really want a sport that’s all strikeout pitchers battling walk-takers, with less room for stolen bases and no patience for the inefficiencies of sacrifice bunts? The old cliches of baseball — the canny veteran who “pitches to contact,” the light-hitting second baseman who heroically “gives up an out” to move to the runner over — deserved the rigorous going-over that sabermetrics gave them, but sometimes pitching to contact and dropping down a bunt makes a game more fun than just watching hitters swing for the fences while flamethrowers try to punch them out. Efficiency is how you win, obviously, but a variety in strategies and skill sets is the spice of sports.

Finally, as regular readers knowall too well, I have a vendetta against the recent expansion of the baseball playoffs to include two extra wild card teams and two sudden-death playoffs. I won’t rehearse that argument here, except to say that last year’s postseason — in which one of the two sudden-death games was tilted by an umpire’s lousy call, and that game’s winner, St. Louis, came within a Barry Zito masterpiece of representing the National League in the World Series — was exactly the kind of outcome I expected: Far from giving division winners some massive advantage (just ask the Washington Nationals about that) or putting an extra small-market Cinderella in the postseason, the additional wild card provided a safety net for a big-market team having a down year, and then that team proceeded to knock off a team that would have finished ten games ahead of them had they shared a division. (In the American League, meanwhile, the two wild cards finished with the same record, so the 1-game playoff mostly ensured that the final weekend was less life-or-death for both teams than it otherwise would have been.)

Of course good-but-not-great teams getting lucky in the postseason has been a defining feature of the wild card era all along. But the new system seems likely to up the randomness quotient even more, in a needless quest for drama that the existing system was already providing. We’ll know more when we’ve played with the new wild cards for more seasons, but for now it’s reason enough to for me appreciate Dougherty’s glass-half-full sentiment without subscribing to it completely.

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About

Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic and a blogger for theatlantic.com. He is the author of "Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class" (Hyperion, 2005) and the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream" (Doubleday, 2008). He is the film critic for National Review.